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Tag Archives: timed_statistics

Domestic bliss. There’s nothing like it. There’s certainly nothing like it in our house, particularly when I indulge in one of my endearing little foibles that is guaranteed to get Deb pouting like Angelina Jolie suffering a nasty reaction to a wasp-sting.
Whether it’s leaving the toilet seat up, or hanging my clothes up on the nearest floor, there are some days where I just can’t seem to do anything right.
Having said that, I must confess that I myself, am not a model of toleration. My own personal pout trigger is a query that looks something like this :

SELECT NVL(COUNT(*), 0)
FROM some_table;

I’ve seen this quite a bit recently, usually in the form of an explicit cursor.
Once I’ve got the rant about this out of my system, I’ll then look at how you might make single-row sub-queries a bit more efficient without ending up knee-deep in implicit cursors.
I’ll also ponder what it actually is that we really know about cursors. Continue reading →